Before we dive into some helpful Social Media metrics, let’s first take a look at Social media as a whole to get a grasp of how important and wide spread it is. It not only has a strong presence in our online domain, but it also develops our brand affinities, influences our online behavior and personal preferences, and reshapes the way we interact. Facebook, Tweeter, Google+, Youtube, Foursquare, LinkedIn and a lot others. As you know, the social media world is quite gigantic.

And the stats have shown that more and more internet users are joining the Social Media world.

From these stats provided by Search Engine Journal you can quickly see that more and more users are joining these online platforms. Sure, a lot of users are joining them, but how many are using them actively?

Well, still a lot.

What are these people doing with social media? In a single day, all these combined users are uploading 350 million photos to FB, posting 400 million tweets, clicking the +1 button more than 5 billion times a day. So it’s a great opportunity to reach out to these people through social media, and remember, not only just to the younger audience.

The older user base is increasing. Actually the 45-54 year age bracket is the fastest growing demographic on both FB and Google+ so now there might be a chance to reach out to them through social media in ways we could not have before.

Now, hearing about all these facts, I think we’ve established that social media is continuing to assert its influence to more and more internet users and plays an important role in their lives. According to Digital Insights, 46% of web users turn to social media for making a purchase. Social media generates almost double the marketing leads of trade shows, telemarketing or daily mail. According to IBM 65%of social media users say they use it to learn more about brands, products and services. So why is it important to know that social media is important? Because as fundraisers, alumni coordinators, marketers, and institutions as a whole, you can use the world of social media to learn more about your client base, identify new prospects, influence opinions and strengthen your brand and message and help achieve your goals.

If we were to look at the social media presence of only one individual, we could potentially derive some important things Like interest by simply monitoring what they’re tweeting about, posting about, and sharing overall. So just by reading all of these, you can start to determine what their likes and dislikes are, what they’re passionate about.

IN a similar manner, you can determine links and relationships. You can see who they are sending public messages too, who they are writing about and so on. But I’ll show you later on a specific example on how you can determine in a cool way, some relationships.

Ability to give (from job title, location, past giving advertised through social media). This is only based on public information

But if we were to take, not a single person, but the social media world as a whole, it’s definitely a bit harder to determine all of these by monitoring the social media presence of an entire population. So you might not determine interest so easily, but use can influence metrics to gain interest. You can determine new relationships and most importantly, by monitoring different social media metrics, you can ensure you are targeting those with an ability to give.

For these reasons, let’s now explore some of the social media metrics that you could add to your fundraising metric toolkit.

One of the first metrics to start to look at is Reach. (which is also named exposure). Reach measures the spread of a social media conversation. On its own, reach can help you understand the context for your content. How far is your content disseminating and how big is the audience for your message?

Reach is a measure of potential audience size or actual audience size. As an example, the potential audience size for LA is the entire population of LA. If you want to be specific you can say it’s the entire pop of LA, of legal age, who likes to donate or have a positive impact to your institution, and if you only want to target them on Twitter, it’s the entire population of LA with an active twitter account. An you can get some these types of data from research firms, like Semiocast. The actual audience size is (Semiocast – Paris based research firm)

The number of followers + the number of your follower’s followers from LA + the engaged users who are not yet followers, but post things about you. This is how you get your actual reach measurement.

But again, looking at social media overall and not just Twitter, there are social signals that you can track to gauge your brandcampaign reach or exposure. Website traffic. What they’ve searched for How many views you’ve had on the things you’ve published. Number of followers and fans, subscribers Number of replies, reposts, comments from non-followers. Tracking this over time, you can also quickly calculate the Reach/Audience Growth Rate. Of course, a large audience is good, but reach alone does not tell you everything. Reach becomes very powerful when compared to other engagement metrics. Reach is best used as the denominator in your social media measurement equations.

But first lets look at the relationship side effect of reach. As soon as you enhance your reach and bring more people into your networks, you’re bound to discover some unknown links/relationships. In this example I’ve used my LinkedIn account. So what you can see are all my connections and their relationships divided into different clusters, By the way, every second, two new members join LinkedIn.

but let’s imagine you are using your organization’s account or alumni group account and so forth. So if this http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/network From groups to blogs to job listings, this platform is a rich source of information and conversation for professionals who want to connect to others in their industry and as I mentioned before you can use it to determine some factor of the ability to give.

What is the size of the conversation about your campaign or brand? Volume is a great measure of that because it is a great initial indicator of interest. People tend to talk about things they either love or hate, but they rarely talk about things they simply don’t care about at all.

While volume can seem like a simple counting metric, there’s more to it than just counting tweets and wall posts. It’s important to measure the number of messages about your brand/campaign, as well as the number of people talking about your brand/campaign, and track how both of those numbers change over time.

Learn when your volume is higher – are there days or times when more people seem to be talking about your brand? You can use this information to focus more of your own posts during these times to get more engagement, another metric which we’ll talk about next.

Remember how we were talking about reach and how if you track change in reach over time, you get reach growth rate? As your Audience Growth Rate is increasing, you also need to ensure that you’re speaking to the right people – and that those people are listening.

This is one the main metrics that drives a social media presence’ success. Pick important actions or engagement numbers like clicks, retweets, or replies and divide them by Reach to calculate an engagement percentage. Of the possible audience for your campaign, how many people participated? Reach also helps contextualize other engagement metrics and helps you answer even more questions.

Is your engagement scaling as your followers grow? As I mentioned, the engagement rate shows how much of your audience you are able to engage. Change in engagement rate can indicate the value of fans gained or lost.

You can choose to pigeonhole your users into different categories determining their engagement level. This is just an example, as you can have as many engagement levels as you want and define them in any way it suits you best.

But then it’s important to see if you can derive some meaningful information out of this that could help you with your campaign. And once you have then engaged and they are part of one of your engagement levels, how do you make them step up into the next level?

This category gets into a bit of a soft space for measurement. Influence is a subjective metric that relies on your company’s perspective for definition. Basically, you want to look at whether the engagement metrics mentioned before are positive, neutral or negative in sentiment. In other words, did your campaign influence positive vibes toward the brand or your message or did it create bad vibe? Either way it will have an overall impact towards your fundraising efforts. What’s great about social media is that not only you can determine someone’s interests, but you can influence them as well. Influence metrics: Change in perceptions (%) Change in awareness (%) Change in attitude (%) Change in preference (%) Purchase consideration or in our case, donation consideration

You can choose a date, coinciding with the start of your campaign, as a cutoff point in to determine the before and after sentiments of a particular topic. This would be the topic you’re trying determine the overall perception/ awareness /attitude about. You can also use automated tools like Topsy, Twitalyzer, Social Mention, Radian 6 or ScoutLabs to make it a little easier, but ALWAYS do a manual check to validate any sentiment results.

Built a Twitter app that imports Tweets containing a particular keyword, parse them through DatumBox (a service for machine learning – which in this case helped us determine the sentiment of a tweet)

And this is our Tableau dashboard on the tweets about UBC within a 24 hour period. This is presented here just as a prototype, but I wanted to show you its potential. Using any keywords you want, you can determine what the rate of positive tweets vs negative are, you can include retweets, you can exclude the ones posted by UBC staff, you can see at what specific time of day you get more tweets, when do negative ones become more prevalent and so on. And again you can check out the tweets at a tweet level. Remember to always validate their sentiment. As an example there’s a negative tweet that mentions “I still can’t believe that I go to UBC”.

Now, if we are going to dedicate resources towards this metrics, it’s also good to have one about return on investment.

Cost per message communicated Cost per contact (Event budget/#people with opportunity to see you message/brand) Cost per lead (Event budget/lead you collect) Cost per customer acquisition (Event budget/customers acquired) Cost per minute spent with prospect is a particularly useful metric if you are comparing events to direct sales activities

Sometimes it’s also good to put the cost in perspective. For example Budlight ad – 3.5 min -&gt;28 million at Superbowl -&gt; reached 111.3 mil viewers Through their youtube video &amp; its spread through other social media platforms, it already reached 40mil viewers for practically free and not only just in US, but other markets selling their product

1. 2. ex: 20% of twitter accounts are dead accounts

Ask for it Contact update forms, donation forms (online &amp; paper), contest entries, event sign-ups, etc. Purchase it Usually based on e-mail and name

Donation via twitter might be possible in the future as right now, gifts via twitter are becoming possible.

Social media is important because even though you might not think it is important to you, does not mean it matters and adding these metrics under your belt will make you a stronger fundraiser